Education and State Formation

Europe, East Asia and the USA

A. Green

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137341754
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Éducation
• Subtopic: Théorie et pratique de l'éducation

Education has always been a key instrument of nation-building in new states. National education systems have typically been used to assimilate immigrants; to promote established religious doctrines; to spread the standard form of national languages; and to forge national identities and national cultures. They helped construct the very subjectivities of citizenship, justifying the ways of the state to the people and the duties of the people to the state. In this second edition of his seminal and widely-acclaimed book on the origins of public education in England, France, Prussia, and the USA, Andy Green shows how education has also been used as a tool of successful state formation in the developmental states of East Asia. While human capital theories have focused on how schools and colleges supply the skills for economic growth, Green shows how the forming of citizens and national identities through education has often provided the necessary condition for both economic and social development.

1

The Uneven Development of National Education Systems in the West

The formation of national education systems in early nineteenth-century Europe marks the beginning of modern schooling in western capitalist societies. With the coming of the school system, education became a universal and national concern, embracing all individuals and having effects on all classes in society. Learning became irreversibly equated with formal, systematic schooling, and schooling itself became a fundamental feature of the state. The national education system thus represented a watershed in the development of learning. It signalled not only the advent of mass education and the spread of popular literacy but also the origins of ‘state schooling’ – the system which has come to predominate in the educational development of all modern societies in the twentieth century.

As an institutional form the national education system had a long period of historical gestation. Educational innovation had been a feature of all western societies since the Protestant Reformation. There were numerous seventeenth-century blueprints for national systems and in the eighteenth century the first inchoate attempts to realize these were pioneered by absolutist monarchs such as Frederick V in Denmark, Maria Theresa in Austria and Frederick the Great in Prussia. They lacked the resources to make their reforms effective but they certainly prefigured later developments with their provision of state funds for public elementary schools and with the enactment of legislation on compulsory attendance. However, it was during the French revolutionary era and the decades that followed that these embryonic national systems were first consolidated and given permanent institutional forms – initially in Prussia and France, and soon after in a host of smaller continental states, such as Switzerland and Holland. Thereafter, the broad parameters of reform in national education are clear: they involved the development of universal forms of provision, the rationalization of administration and institutional structure, and the development of forms of public finance and control.

National networks of elementary schools were consolidated with the help of the state, and gradually free tuition and compulsory attendance laws ensured universal childhood participation; secondary education expanded from its tiny elite base and progressively incorporated more modern curricula and pedagogy; technical and vocational schools proliferated, albeit unevenly, to meet new industrial demands. As educational provision expanded, so it also became more regulated and, by degrees, more systematic in organization. Diverse institutions were unified into a single structure, increasingly administered through an integrated educational bureaucracy and with teaching provided by trained staff. An age-graded, hierarchical system developed whose component parts were systematically linked and complementary, in time to become part of an ‘educational ladder’ whose different rungs were articulated through regulated curricula and entrance requirements. Lastly, educational control passed increasingly to the state. As public schools came to predominate over private and voluntary institutions, governments ineluctably increased their influence on education. Whether through central or local authorities, the state increasingly controlled education through the allocation of funds, the licensing and inspection of schools, the recruitment, training and certification of teachers and, in varying degrees, through the oversight of national certification and standard curricula.

These changes represented a decisive break with the voluntary and particularistic form of learning which had preceded them, where church, family and guild had provided for their own needs. As Michael Katz has suggested in his essay on the origins of public education in the United States, this change was radical and far-reaching:

By the latter part of the nineteenth century, the organization, scope and role of schooling had been fundamentally transformed. In the place of a few schools dotted about town and country, there existed in most cities true educational systems: carefully articulated, hierarchically structured groupings of schools, primarily free and often compulsory, administered by full-time experts, and progressively taught by specially trained staff. No longer casual adjuncts to the home and the apprenticeship, such schools were highly formal institutions designed to play a critical role in the socialization of the young, the maintenance of social order, and in the promotion of development.¹

The creation of a set of institutions solely devoted to education, and involving a putative monopoly of formal learning and training for diverse occupations, thus signalled a revolution in the concept and forms of education and a transformation in the relations between schooling, society and the state. Education not only became a mass phenomenon; it also became a central feature of social organization.

However, these developments, sketched here only in their broadest outline, occurred unevenly and in different forms from country to country. Although all western nations were eventually to adopt a system broadly in line with the model above, they did so at different times and with significant formal variations. The classic form of the public education system, with state-financed and regulated schools and an elaborate administrative bureaucracy, occurred first on the Continent, notably in the German states, France, Holland and Switzerland. All these countries had established the basic form of their public systems by the 1830s, although in France, universal attendance was not achieved until some 50 years later. The northern states of the United States followed, developing public education systems, according to their own more decentralized design, in the period between 1830 and the Civil War. Britain, the Southern European States and the American South lagged considerably behind, in England’s case delaying the full establishment of an integrated public system until the following century. Although some countries were slow to recognize it, the achievement of high rates of attendance, competent teaching and widespread popular literacy were indisputably linked with the development of public systems because the old voluntary networks of schools were simply incapable of providing universal provision without state assistance. It followed that in countries such as Britain, or rather England and Wales (since Scotland and Ireland had distinctive educational arrangements) where public systems were slow to develop, educational levels were noticeably low. A brief sketch of the chronology of public educational development in the principal countries concerned in this study should illustrate the degree of national variation.

Prussia, 1780–1840

Prussia pioneered the development of national education in the eighteenth century, but it was in the years between the Prussian defeat by Napoleon at Jena in 1806 and the death of Altenstein, the Minister of Education, in 1840, that the national system was consolidated. Although free elementary tuition was not made law until 1868, a national public system was essentially in place by the end of Altenstein’s ministry. Frederick II’s compulsory attendance laws in 1763 marked the first important move in the direction of national education. The creation of a secondary-school board in 1787 was the first decisive shift towards state control. This was reinforced by the 1794 Allgemeines Landrecht law giving the state rights of supervision in all schools and requiring state regulation of all teachers.²

The organization of a state administrative structure, supervising a network of elementary schools, dates from 1808 when Humboldt became head of the Bureau of Ecclesiastical Affairs and Public Instruction, and created the celebrated Volksschule system. Each of the provinces were given a board for secondary schools and each district had a governmental board to oversee primary and junior secondary education.³ A law of 1810 made education a secular activity and compulsory for three years.⁴ Regulations of 1812 reformed the Gymnasium, making it a nine-year public secondary school able to confer the Abitur certificate, which controlled entry into higher education.⁵ Further regulations in 1826 made schooling compulsory between the ages of 7 and 14, gave each parish an elementary school and prescribed training for all teachers. By 1837, detailed ministerial regulations for the Gymnasien covered the admission of pupils, the subjects taught, the length of terms, the distribution and working hours of teachers, and the nature of religious and physical education.

During Altenstein’s ministry (1817–38), elementary education was extended and increasingly regulated, reaching its acme of illiberal, centralized efficiency and, at the same time, winning wide international acclaim.⁶ By the 1830s there was thus a full national system of public elementary and secondary schools, which provided universal, compulsory schooling up to 14 years of age, and secondary education for the elite thereafter. Schools were public institutions, controlled by a complete state educational bureaucracy and financed largely through taxation. Public elementary schools already greatly outnumbered private schools and by 1861 they did so in the proportion of 34 to 1.⁷ The state not only licensed and inspected schools, but also licensed and trained teachers, specified the curriculum and regulated national examinations. Elementary education was clearly quite distinct from secondary schooling but the rudiments of an articulated hierarchy of schools were developing, assisted by the creation, from the 1830s onwards, of various types of post-elementary and intermediate schools. Decades ahead of any other nation, Prussia had an integrated public school system which, not coincidentally, also exercised the most rigid control over what was taught.

France, 1806–1882

French educational development presents a more complex case where national education evolved in a less uniform manner over a longer period. The central administrative apparatus was created by Napoleon with the laws founding the Université in 1806 and 1808. The Napoleonic lycée was created in 1802, giving the state strategic control over secondary education. During the Bourbon Restoration the central administrative apparatus was maintained and the state consolidated its hold over education. An ordinance of 1816 required each commune to maintain a primary school for boys under the control of communal committees and the 1833 Loi Guizot extended state control over the licensing of teachers and inspection of schools, and extended primary schooling for boys and girls to each commune.⁸

By the time of the Second Empire one can already speak of a full juridical and administrative framework for national education. Public schools already dominated over private schools at primary level and state secondary schools were almost as numerous as private ones. In 1850 there were 43 843 public primary schools and 16 736 private institutions.⁹ By 1865 the lycée and college had virtually caught up with the private Catholic schools, accounting for 46 per cent of the country’s 143 375 secondary-school pupils.¹⁰ Of the 556 major secondary schools, the state controlled the majority, including 77 lycées and 251 municipal colleges.¹¹ Thus by the mid-century there was already a dominant public sector and an integrated educational bureaucracy at national and local levels which was responsible for licensing and inspecting schools, training and certificating teachers, organizing public finance and regulating national examinations. However, the spread of elementary education did not keep pace with the relative advance of secondary and vocational schooling, nor match the precocious bureaucracy of the administrative apparatus. It was not until 1882, with the Jules Ferry Laws, that elementary education became free and compulsory, and universal provision was not achieved before this time.

The United States, 1830–1865

The United States had no national education system as such since it had adopted a federal structure where each state had sovereign powers over its education. Each state had an individual system although certain federal regulations did require educational provisions as a condition of entry into the Union for the new territories. However, it would be broadly true to say that the southern states did not generally develop public education systems until after the Civil War, whilst most northern states did so during the Era of Reform between 1830 and 1860. It would be inappropriate here to attempt to summarize individual state legislation on schooling but, suffice to say, a number of general indices do demonstrate the existence of public systems in the northern states by the time of the Civil War.

During the reform era most northern states developed systems of public schools, financed from public sources and administered by the state and county education boards. Municipally owned and controlled, ‘common schools’ outflanked voluntary and charity schools during...